Richards Will Have to Walk for Telling the Truth

Loose talk costs jobs and the clock is ticking on Sir Dave Richards' position as the most senior administrator in English football. Admitting the policies of the Premier League, of which he is chairman, are harming the England team might not seem like rocket science, but to colleagues such as the chief executive, Richard Scudamore, and many club chairmen, it will appear tantamount to a suicide note.

Those who have followed Richards' rise up the greasy pole of football politics will not expect him to give up without a fight. But the fact is that the man who two years ago was knighted for his services to sport is, at 64 years old, the product of a bygone football era.

The former engineer's Premier League power base has been depleted incrementally with each sale of one of his organization's member clubs. Once he was surrounded by men with whom he shared much in common: for the likes of Newcastle United's Freddy Shepherd and Manchester United's Martin Edwards football would also be a source of unforeseen riches. But to this new breed of billionaire owners England's industrial north is a more alien land than the east-Asian territories they are bent on conquering.

The league has gone through a revolution, bloodless but total, and now has global ambitions that a man of Richards's limited diplomacy could never deliver. It was he who made the presentation to Fifa's law-making International Football Association Board earlier this year promoting the League's experiments with goal-line technology, hoping to see them adopted across the globe.

Michel Platini's vote torpedoed the proposal. Richards' response? To tell the Uefa president, a Fifa vice president, a former world and European player of the year and one who had fronted France's hosting of the 1998 World Cup: "You're killing football".

It was a hot-headed outburst, characteristic of Richards but so unbecoming of one in his position. There was, of course, history between Richards and Platini. Richards could not forgive Platini his swift, belittling response to the League's Game 39 plans, one that set the tone for the derided scheme.

But Richards was himself instrumental in leading the way in the Football Association's populist and ill-conceived appointment in 2006 of an Englishman to the national job, with his insistence that "It's time for a British manager". Lest we forget, he was also one of those who decided that the performance at interview of the only outstanding domestic candidate on the short list, Martin O'Neill, was too weak for him be entrusted with the job (his CV notwithstanding). Instead England got Steve McClaren.

"Does the Premier League hurt the national side," he asks; answering: "I think the answer to that has got to be yes." Damn right, Sir Dave.

But it is not his increasingly erratic performance over the past couple of years that will probably cost him his job. Nor even his scandalous disregard for Sheffield Wednesday's plight, the club whose chairmanship gave him his leg-up in football politics but which has received no help in its search for overseas investment from a man who is a member of more overseas football committees than Platini himself.

No, it is because his indiscretions about a company that pays him hundreds of thousands of pounds a year (for a three-day week) are more damaging even than those which caused Max Mosley such grief. Staggeringly, being caught on camera whipping the bare backside of a vice girl is not insuperable in the warped world of sports politics.

But these remarks, which puncture the heart of the League's fallacious claim that its status as a 20-club cartel has not damaged the national team it supposedly set out to protect, are surely too sensitive to survive. The pity is that, just for once, this time Richards was saying something we could all agree with.